More than a week after a commercial structure fire occurred at Gregory Pallet & Lumber’s Stuart site at approximately 1 a.m. on March 28, work at the facility has returned to normal and is fully operational.
Operations Director Dan Lovern said 95 percent of the company’s business is operated by its Roanoke facility.
“Then we have another facility in Elliston, Virginia, so we’re running at 100 percent. We had a small operation there” in Stuart, “so the manufacturing, or the facility repair, and some equipment” was lost in the blaze, he said.
An estimated 10 acres of the approximately 20-acre facility along with numerous structures, vehicles, and other equipment was burnt in the fire.
While he doesn’t have an exact figure of how much revenue was lost due to the fire, Lovern said work is being done to calculate it.
No employees are expected to lose their jobs because of the fire, he said.
“In fact, we’ve probably kept them on just cleaning the site up. We have three drivers that run out of there and they’ve been running everyday – we just worked them into our Roanoke rotation. We have other facilities, so we’ve been able to put supplies in there from our other facilities,” Lovern said, adding the facility is expected to restart work in the repair business this week.
Due to the scale of financial loss and physical damage caused by the fire the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and Virginia State Police are assisting the Patrick County Sheriff’s Office in investigating the cause and origin of the fire.
Lovern said that as of April 2, the company hasn’t seen the fire reports or received any information from investigators.
As with the Meadow of Dan Elementary School fire more than a decade ago, Patrick County Sheriff Dan Smith said federal investigators were called into help – partially because of how large the fire was and the amount of property loss.
“It’s nothing suspicious at all. I will tell you that,” Smith said.
Lt. Steve Austin said the sheriff’s office has relinquished the case to the Virginia State Police.
“Our involvement was to secure the scene while the State Police investigators investigated the fire,” Austin said.
Stuart Volunteer Fire Department Fire Chief Buddy Dollarhite said once the department arrived on scene the whole area was fully involved.
“We decided to go ahead and try to go countywide and get as many departments as we possibly could and also tone out departments in Stokes County and Surry County for additional water because we knew with that large of a fire, we were going to need plenty of water,” he said.
Twenty-three fire departments, the Virginia Department of Forestry (VDF), the Patrick County Sheriff’s Office, Patrick County Emergency Management, Patrick County EMS, and the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) were on scene to assist with putting out the fire.
Dollarhite estimated that there were approximately 85 fire personnel on scene with all Patrick County departments having at least one person present. Stokes, Surrey, Henry Counties also had personnel on scene.
“We utilized 22 tankers to put out pretty much the whole area there — he had 35,000 and 40,000 pallets on site. We estimated we used anywhere around 250,000 to 300,000 gallons of water to put the fire out,” he said.
Dollarhite said the pond at Buddy Williams’ place and Wayside Park were used as fill sites to refill the tankers with water.
“We pretty much took a defensive posture on it, we tried to contain what we had. All in all, it ended up being 16 acres of a brush fire,” he said.
In addition to the structure fire with the pallets, the fire spread into a brush fire across the road.
“We had a 10 acres brush fire across the road on the other side that we had to contend with as well, and that’s where we used the VDF fire plow and about five brush trucks from different departments to help contain that as well,” he said.
Dollarhite said the departments finished up most of the operations around 11 a.m. Friday morning.
“We did go back several times because there were investigators there and you have hotspots, so we went back six additional times to check on it and put some hotspots out,” he said.
